


The Wanheda Tape

by elle_stone



Series: October 2020 Fics [2]
Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - 1990s, Alternate Universe - College/University, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Exes, F/F, Found Footage, Ghosts, Horror, Urban Legends, Witchcraft
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-25
Updated: 2020-10-25
Packaged: 2021-03-09 00:16:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,646
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27185066
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/elle_stone/pseuds/elle_stone
Summary: "It's the Wanheda Tape. Yougottaremember this. It happened like five or six years ago. Those dumbass college kids went into the woods out past the auto shop and got lost and never came back... Seriously, what were you two doing in the fourth grade, living under a rock?"Written for Chopped Choice: Horror. Second place winner for best use of the combined tropes. First place winner for best use of Halloween and best scary story. Second place winner overall.
Relationships: Clarke Griffin & Raven Reyes & John Murphy & Nathan Miller, Clarke Griffin/Raven Reyes, John Murphy & Raven Reyes, Octavia Blake & Monty Green & Jasper Jordan
Series: October 2020 Fics [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2088516
Comments: 16
Kudos: 35
Collections: Chopped Choice: Horror





	The Wanheda Tape

**Author's Note:**

> For today's Chopped Choice: Horror entry, I chose the following theme and tropes:
> 
> Theme: Historical (1990s)  
> Tropes: exes + urban legends + found footage + abandoned building
> 
> I also could have chosen 'based on a movie' because this is a very blatant take-off of _The Blair Witch Project_ \--with one caveat: I did not rewatch the movie before writing the fic. So it's more like a take-off of my vague memories of the aesthetic.
> 
> This fic was a real experiment for me, especially in terms of trying to replicate the feel of 'found footage' in text. It's a much more dialogue-heavy style than I usually write in and keeping the point of view omniscient (or, more accurately, centered in an inanimate object) was really tough! 
> 
> **Warnings and tags** : As you can see, I rated this story T and didn't tag for anything like major character death. You will not find direct or graphic death scenes in this fic. However, it is a ghost story and a horror story. And as you can tell from the summary, the implied ending for our main characters is not happy. Please keep this in mind when choosing whether or not to read.
> 
> ETA: I originally had Jasper and Monty playing Pokemon in the 4th grade, an embarrassing anachronism, as Pokemon wasn't yet invented in 1993. The error is now fixed!

Octavia doesn't mean to get in trouble, but somehow it happens again and again, and no one ever wants to hear the explanation.

In this particular instance, she was minding her own business, walking home from school, with her CD player tucked into the pocket on the side of her backpack, and her headphones on. Barely even aware of where she was, since she knows the route so well. Then out of nowhere, there's this dog. Big, friendly golden retriever, and he wants to play fetch. So she took her softball—technically, a softball belonging to Arkadia High, which she definitely had permission to take home, so she could get ready for tryouts in the spring—and started tossing it for him. Probably not the use the athletics department had in mind for its softballs, but that's not the Wallaces' problem anyway.

So just by chance, she happened to be passing right by the old Wallace Manor just as she and this dog were getting really into the game. And then she threw the ball a little too hard, and too much to the side, and it flew right over that creepy, rusty wrought iron fence of theirs and right through the front window. Completely and utterly by accident. Barely even her fault.

Though she will admit it was an impressive throw. Coach Diyoza did say she had a great arm.

Thus, through no fault of her own, Octavia finds herself doing penance, the worst kind of penance imaginable: reorganizing the old, dusty, musty, gross Wallace library on the first beautiful, golden Saturday in October. She can see the way the breeze flutters through the new-yellow leaves on the oak in the front yard. She can watch the neighbors walking their dogs and the young couples pushing strollers—even Monty and Jasper skateboarding by on their way home from the park. But she isn't allowed to so much as crack open a window to feel some fresh air or undiluted afternoon sun. She even has to keep the thick old velvet curtains mostly drawn, so that none of the light can harm the books, which just adds a whole new layer of grim shadow to the place.

It's torture.

And as far as she can tell, she's not the only one who's ever been tortured in the Wallace Shop of Horrors. Every gross cardboard box she opens, every drawer she peeks into, and every shelf she dusts yields some new, disturbing oddity. A jar of something pickled and green. A jar of something pickled and purple. An entire, whole-ass skeleton. A moth-eaten shawl like something Norman Bates would wear. A chess set but the white pieces have the color and texture of bone. A bundle of threatening letters. A photo album of black and white mugshots of people who _must_ be serial killers.

And, hidden behind a super expensive-looking and very dusty set of leatherbound books, a VHS tape.

Octavia yanks it out from between the books and the wall, where it was jammed in at an angle, and reads the thick, black text written in Sharpie on the front.

She frowns.

Then she reads it again.

Then she carefully slips the tape into her backpack, between her English and Algebra notes, and discreetly zips it closed.

*

She finds Jasper and Monty exactly where she knew she would find them: in Jasper's room with the windows open but the blinds closed, watching MTV. They won’t notice her knocking, so she lets herself in.

The place, as always, smells faintly of weed, and she makes a show of fanning her nose and squinting as she closes the door behind her. "How do your parents not know you're stoners?" she grimaces, barely avoiding tripping over Jasper's sneakers on her way to the TV.

"How have you still not learned to knock?" Monty shoots back, at the same time as Jasper shrugs and answers:

"They respect my privacy."

Octavia rolls her eyes. Secretly, she thinks Jasper's room is the best place on Earth, or at least top five. The walls are painted a medium shade of blue, but are also almost invisible beneath a collage of posters and random pages cut from magazines. He owns a boombox and a lava lamp, and a huge CD tower, in addition to a whole collection of random thrift store junk, strewn all over the desk and the bedside table and, often, the floor. And he has two sets of windows, one that looks out on the front yard and exits directly onto the porch roof, and another that faces Monty's house, next door, so they can send messages to each other in their own weird hand signal language even when they're supposed to be asleep.

Plus, he has a TV.

Octavia steps in front of said TV now and drops her backpack to the floor with a thud. Jasper immediately scrambles up to his knees in protest, asking her what the hell she's doing, and Monty, who is also lying on his stomach on the bed, raises his hands and gestures, mutely, with outrage. Octavia ignores them both and leans down to unzip her bag and pull out the tape.

"You can watch Britney Spears dancing in a schoolgirl outfit some other time," she says, standing up straight again and waving the VHS back and forth like a prize. "I have something _else_ for us to watch. And we gotta do it now," she adds, the tempting, mysterious lilt abruptly dropping from her voice, "because my brother will throw a fit if I'm not home for dinner."

"What the hell is that?" Monty asks as he sits up, crossing his legs beneath himself.

"It's The Wanheda Tape," she answers triumphantly, and holds it out for him to take.

"I repeat," he says. "What the hell is that?"

"Oh—oh! It's—" Jasper snaps his fingers. "It's that weird—that legend about the woods—"

"You're not helping." Octavia sighs, and snatches the VHS back from Monty's loose grip. She turns around and slides it into the player beneath the TV. It hesitates on the edge, then slips neatly in and clicks into place, the thin rectangular door falling over it. She presses the rewind button just in case. "You _gotta_ remember this. It happened like five or six years ago. Those dumbass college kids went into the woods out past the auto shop and got lost and never came back." She glances back over her shoulder, but her friends' expressions are still confused and blank. "Seriously, what were you two doing in the fourth grade, living under a rock?"

They turn to each other, some silent message passing between them, then back to her. "Playing Myst," Jasper answers.

"The whole time?"

"Yeah, pretty much."

Octavia sighs again, shaking her head. The tape whirs faster and faster, then comes abruptly to a stop. She stands and turns to them, her hands on her hips. "Well I remember it," she says. "My mom talked about it all the time. It was a super big deal. The cousin of one of the kids said he was working on a documentary about Wanheda or something like that. That was the only clue anyone had about why they were even out there. But just like they didn't find the kids, they didn't find the tape." She pauses, building a dramatic effect. "Until now."

"Where'd you get that thing anyway?" Monty asks. He still sounds skeptical, but Octavia doesn't have any time for questions or uncertainty.

"At the Wallace house, now shut up." She grabs the remote, kicks off her shoes, and climbs up onto the bed, squashing herself between them so that Monty grumbles and Jasper has to sit up properly. He bends his knee and slings his arm around his leg, running his thumb across his lip thoughtfully.

"And we're just going to watch it?" he asks. "Right now?"

"Well—yeah," Octavia answers, pushing her hair back over her shoulder. "Obviously." She pauses a moment, thoughtful, then asks, "What? Are you scared?"

Jasper's mouth thins and his shoulders square. "No. Of course not."

"Good." She points the remote at the tv, switches over the VHS player, and then hits play. "Because this is going to be fun."

*

The video jumps to life with a shot of feet: the bottom of a pair of jeans leading to men’s tan hiking boots, standing on an asphalt road, the back tire of a blue sedan at the edge of the frame. In the background, the sound of jogging footsteps merges with the crinkling of paper, all subsumed beneath the close, static sound of fabric rubbing against fabric. The date in the corner of the screen reads 10/29/1993.

Without warning, the shot swoops up, suddenly and inexpertly. It lands on a trio of college-aged kids: a boy in a beanie, adjusting the straps of his backpack; a blonde girl, poring over the map she’s laid out over the trunk of the car; and a second girl, her brown hair in a ponytail, facing away from the camera and toward the woods.

This far out of town, only the woods and the single paved road are left.

Most of the leaves have fallen by this time of year, leaving the trees bare-limbed and thin—revealing between themselves only an endlessness of forest—and the ground littered in shades of orange and red. The color of the light implies late afternoon, not quite muted enough for twilight, and all three of the hikers are bundled up in layers, puffy vests and coats and unbuttoned plaid flannel shirts, as if warding off a crisp deep-autumn chill.

When the boy in the beanie notices the camera trained on him, he flashes a wide, flirty grin, checks the camera man out with an exaggerated up-and-down look. Then he nods toward the blonde and, holding his open hand against the side of his mouth like a screen, stage-whispers, “Look at her staring at the map like she has any idea where we’re going.”

“Shut up, Miller!” the blonde answers, not looking up.

“Yeah, shut up,” the cameraman adds. “The more you talk, the more I’ll have to edit out. I haven’t done my introductions yet.”

“Yeah, sure, this is a real professional production,” the second girl says, turning around, crossing her arms and shrugging her shoulders up toward her ears. She doesn’t seem to want to meet anyone’s eye. Her mouth is set in a thin, weary scowl.

“Look alive, people, look alive.” The muffled sound of clapping, like a hand hitting a jacket sleeve, comes from behind the camera. “This is the big opening scene. Here we have our intrepid group of adventurers. Miller—” A shaky zoom onto the boy— “Raven—” A quick jolt to the left, the focus briefly shifting to the girl in the ponytail—“And Clarke.” The shot moves more slowly into a closeup of the blonde, the cameraman walking toward her and taking in first her profile, then the map. “And I’m Murphy. We’re spending our Halloween weekend wandering through the woods in search the lost Trikru Settlement, and the ghost of the witch, Wanheda.”

As he speaks, he pans up again, trying to focus on the woods but only briefly blurring out the scene.

“Is she out there?” he asks, his voice pitched low with an attempted air of mystery. “Is she haunting these very woods as we speak? What disturbing, unnatural phenomena will we encounter—?”

“Should we have gone to the Engineering Department costume party instead?” Raven finishes, sticking her head directly in the center of the shot.

“Reyes, you’re really fucking with my artistic vision.”

“Someone explain to me,” she says, looking not at the camera, but at Clarke, “why we’re going to spend the next three nights sleeping on the ground, chasing after fake ghosts, instead of going to the biggest rager of the year.”

“Because—because this is cooler,” Clarke snaps. “Why would we want to dress up in the same tired old costumes and hang out with the same tired old people and drink the same old watered-down beer, when we could have an actual adventure instead?” She’s folding up the map now, stuffing it in the side pocket of her backpack. “I don’t know what’s out there, if it’s a witch or a ghost or—whatever. But it _is_ real.”

“Speak for yourself on the costume bit,” Miller’s voice says from off screen. “I was going to be a werewolf and it was going to be awesome.”

Clarke doesn’t seem to hear him. “And anyway,” she adds, glaring at Raven, “you didn’t have to come.”

Raven’s eyes narrow. “You’d like that, wouldn’t you?”

“Are you two going to be like this the entire time because—actually never mind. This could be my B plot. And if you end up getting back together, I can always switch the genre from horror-documentary to romance.”

Clarke ignores this, too, biting the corner of her lip as she turns away. She looks first pointedly off toward the deepening shadows of the forest, then glances up at the sky. “I just wish we’d gotten an earlier start,” she says. “Come on, let’s just—stop arguing and head out.”

“Sorry about that,” Miller answers, without sounding sorry at all, as he falls into step behind her. Barely organized, the group starts to make its way toward the tree line. “But I happen to actually like my Friday Shakespeare class and I didn’t want to skip.”

“Uh— _nerd_ ,” Murphy fake coughs, the camera shaking with the movement. He jumps over a fallen log just at the edge of the road, and the sound of dry leaves crunching beneath boots becomes louder. Clarke leads the way confidently down a thin, barely visible path, Miller behind her, Raven following a close third.

“Says the guy who literally brought his homework with him for our fun Halloween weekend,” she says, looking back at Murphy over her shoulder.

“Why, yes, _Raven_ , I _am_ getting an early start on my Film final. Two birds, one stone. Genius.” He stops up short, then, even with her, and trains the camera squarely on her face, zooms in slowly as the footsteps of the others become ever fainter in the background. “That’s why _I’m_ here. And why—exactly—are _you_?”

Raven frowns, but doesn’t answer—in the distance, Clarke’s voice calls, “Are you two coming or what?”

Then she slaps her hand across the camera lens and mutters, “Shut up, Murphy.”

*

Two figures, visible at first as little more than silhouettes, lit by the raging, hellish flame of their campfire. The glow catches the angles and hollows of their faces, casts their shadows, long and black, along the ground. As the camera pans from one face to the other, it catches Raven glancing briefly toward Clarke, an unreadable, thin expression around her mouth.

The hulking shadows of two tents rise up in the background. The spit and hiss of the flames competes with the intermittent, low hooting of an owl, somewhere above them in the trees.

Clarke pulls her knees up toward her chest and slings her arms around them. She seems on the verge of speaking. But before she can, the shuffling sound of leaves being thrown aside by the toes of boots rises above even the sound of the flames, and a third figure walks into the center of the shot, and sits down on the ground between the other two. Miller hands Raven and Clarke each a drink, then tosses a third can to Murphy. “Hope it’s not too watered down for Clarke’s taste,” he says, flipping open the tab on top of his own beer with a barely audible hiss. “Everyone ready for some scary stories?”

General nods and sounds of agreement meet the question, Raven’s the least enthused, as the camera zooms in a little closer on Miller’s face. “Tonight’s tale—the legend of the witch Wanheda.”

He pauses a moment, takes a drink and lets his gaze flick among the other three.

Then he begins.

“This story starts as a utopia. One hundred years ago, just shy of the turn of the last century, a group of women left the town of Arkadia to build their own settlement in the woods. No one believed they would last through the winter, but somehow, they did. They flourished. Every now and again a representative or two from the community, now called Trikru, would venture back to Arkadia to trade or to sell game they’d caught or vegetables they’d managed to grow, and so the townspeople knew that the women were thriving, even without the aid of men.

“And they knew that Trikru thrived because of their leader, a strong, outspoken, confident woman who had long been at odds with the town council, loathed by the Mayor and most of the Arkadian elite. She came from a wealthy family herself but refused to marry, and rumors abounded that she was in an…unnatural relationship with one of her circle of close female friends.”

He lets a brief silence settle, here, a half-smirk curling at the corner of his mouth.

“Unnatural,” he adds, “is their word, not mine.”

Clarke hums, and the camera presses in closer to her, as she tilts her head and stares directly into the jumping campfire flames.

“You’d think the Mayor and his buddies would be glad to see this threatening force of a woman go, but her success grated on them. Clawed at them. Haunted them. Other rumors began to spread throughout the town, more intricate versions of the stories that had long followed the woman: that she was able to garden in the forest, to always find the best game even in winter, to survive so well all on her own, because she was a witch. She practices dark magic out there in the woods, they said. She corrupted our daughters and pulled them into her pact with the Devil, they said. And if you wander out there at night, you’ll find them dancing round a raging bonfire, chanting, naked. Pledging themselves to evil.”

Miller’s voice has dropped low now, his words a steady rhythm above the chirping of night insects, the uncertain rustling forest sounds. Clarke holds out one hand toward the fire, warming her palm.

“So the townspeople did as scared, confused, riled up townspeople always they do: they gathered their biggest and dumbest men and invaded the forest, and destroyed the Trikru settlement in the middle of the night. They razed the garden and salted the earth. They torched the houses. And then they ran away. Why they didn’t finish the job, we’ll never know. Scared away, perhaps, by something they didn’t dare describe? By something they didn’t understand? But they left the woman and roughly a third of her people still standing. And that was their fateful mistake.”

He stops again, to take another drink, the camera focused and steady on his face.

“So?” Raven asks, sudden and sharp from off to the right. “What happens next? That’s obviously not the end.”

“No,” Miller agrees, but he sounds bitter. “It’s not. One of the casualties was the woman’s best friend—her lover, probably. And in a fit of rage and grief, the woman took revenge upon the men who had destroyed her home. Every single one was dead within the year. None were provable murders, just a series of freak accidents and unfortunate illnesses. But those who believed the woman truly was a witch—they blamed black magic every time. They started speaking in hushed tones about _Wanheda_ , the word scratched into the glass of every house death visited that spring.

“‘An evil witch did it’ isn’t the sort of argument that holds up in a court of law, not even in the 1890s. So the woman—Wanheda—remained free to return to the forest and rebuild her settlement. This time, though, instead of thriving, it suffered. Every bit of good luck they’d had before turned sour. The gardens never recovered. The game was scarce. The winter was hard. And by the fall every last woman in Trikru had died, except Wanheda herself.”

“So what happened to her?” Clarke asks. She’s rocking back and forth now, gently, her chin tucked in against her knees.

“We don’t know,” Miller answers. “The settlement was real; it’s in the local history books. Someone even managed to take some pictures, not long after it was abandoned for good, including of the simple graveyard at the edge of the clearing. One grave marker for each woman—minus one. Maybe Wanheda left and found a new home somewhere else. More likely, she died too, the very last of them, with no one to bury her. Not that a body was ever found.”

He pauses again, takes another look at Clarke, at Raven, then a last lingering stare at Murphy and the camera. “All we know is she was never seen again. But something still haunts these woods. Everyone who’s ever bought a house on the west edge of town has heard the strange noises coming from out here at night. Some describe it as whistling; some as singing. Some as chanting.

“My cousin used to work out at the auto shop on Industrial, just over there.” He jerks his head back over his left shoulder. “Once, when he was driving home, not long after sunset in the fall, he noticed a figure on the side of the road. She stuck out to him because there’s never anyone out here, especially not at night, and not on foot, and also because she was wearing this old-timey looking long skirt and some kind of cape. She didn’t do anything, just stared at him as he drove. But he still sees her sometimes in his nightmares.

“Wanheda’s never ventured into the town again, not as far as we know. She seems to have gotten her fill of revenge. But she’s still fiercely protective of these woods.” He picks up a stick, poking idly at the fire until a few bright sparks flash up like fireflies into the black. “You have to be very brave or very stupid to go wandering around her forest, especially after dark.”

Murphy laughs, a nervous, dry, humorless sound. “So which are we?”

“You don’t really think all this is real, do you?” Raven asks, but before Miller can answer, Clarke says, decisively:

“It is.”

She doesn’t elaborate, and after a long moment, the camera still trained carefully on Clarke’s face, Raven’s voice asks, “How can you possibly know that?”

“I just do.” She looks up, staring at Raven across the flames. “I just know she’s out there. Somewhere in these woods.”

*

“Good morning!” Murphy’s voice calls, with exaggerated cheer, as the camera flicks on to a shot of a tent flap being unzipped. “Beautiful day, isn’t it? Sunny, not too cold, nice breeze…” The view shakes a little as he pulls himself out of the tent and to his feet, then sweeps to take in the campsite, the other tent, the gutted campfire, the bare limbs of the trees against a background of clear, October sky. “Really just aces. Except for—this!”

He whirls around, and trains the camera on a large tree at the edge of the campsite. From one of its branches, four strange ornaments are hung by course and ratted strings. Formed from sticks and twine, they resemble four tiny dolls, each turning slowly, eerily in the faint morning breeze.

“I mean seriously, what the fuck are these?” he shouts. Then he swings the camera down slightly and to the right, to show a thick, weather beaten, leather journal nailed to the trunk of the tree. “And what the fuck is that?”

“Murphy’s obsessing about the tree again,” Raven’s voice calls, unimpressed, from somewhere behind him, her footsteps crunching closer through the leaves. Additional footsteps follow, until all four are assembled: Raven, looking wan about the eyes and tired, but not scared; Miller carrying a package of trail mix, his hand stuck halfway into the bag, as he stares up at the four wooden figures twisting on their strings; and Clarke, her expression open and curious, stepping closer than the others dare toward the talismans.

“Yeah, I’m obsessing,” Murphy says. “Because none of these were here last night. So, please, Reyes, give me the non-creepy explanation as to what they’re doing here.”

“I don’t know.” She shrugs. “Prank.”

“Okay, which one of you assholes is responsible, then?” Murphy snaps.

“Clarke—what are you doing?”

At Miller’s question, Murphy turns around again so quickly that the frame briefly loses focus, the video a blur of gold and brown. It settles again on Clarke, who is reaching out carefully for the journal nailed to the tree. “These things were obviously left here for a reason,” she says. “You’re not curious what’s in it?”

“I think it’s pretty obvious why they’re here,” Murphy says. “As a warning. What did you say last night, Miller? You have to be brave or stupid to come into these woods? I don’t know about the three of you, but I’m not stupid.”

“Not brave either, I guess,” Raven deadpans.

Clarke is pulling the nail carefully free. It sticks at first, then quickly starts to wobble, as if, despite its deep rusted color, it had only been lightly embedded in the wood.

“It’s not necessarily a warning,” Miller says, as he crunches down on a handful of nuts and pretzels. “I mean, it could be anything. Protective measure. Boundary marker. Decoration.”

“Four creepy stick figure dolls and four of us?” Murphy turns the camera back to the figures in evidence. “That’s not a decoration. Come on.”

“You should be happy about this, Murphy,” Raven says. Her voice is light, but she’s watching Clarke with a steady gaze, as she finally takes the journal gently in her hand and lets the useless nail fall to the ground. “I mean, your documentary wouldn’t be any good if it were just four college students wandering through the woods, arguing about who ate all the chocolate bits in the trail mix.” She side-eyes Miller briefly. “Maybe _you_ put these little ornaments up. Maybe this whole let’s-turn-back thing is an act.”

Murphy snorts. “I appreciate the compliment to my acting skills, Reyes. But this is genuinely just me being smarter than you.”

Raven’s mouth thins into an angry frown, and she pointedly turns away and crosses her arms tight against her chest. Clarke is flipping through the journal carefully. Its delicate, worn pages are yellowed with age, spotted as if by dried rain or snow.

“What’s it say?” Miller asks.

“Nothing,” she answers, and slips it in the front pocket of her hoodie. “But I’m keeping it anyway. Come on. We need to break camp and head out so we don’t waste any more time.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Miller answers, and reaches out with one hand to turn Murphy, and his camera, back toward the tents.

*

“Update: it’s one in the afternoon. Or—thereabouts.”

Murphy’s voice sounds ragged and breathless, tinged with annoyance. The camera keeps a mostly steady view of the woods ahead of him, Clarke setting the pace at the front of the group, Raven and Miller just behind. Whatever narrow path had first led them into the forest has disappeared, merged entirely with the leaf-covered forest floor. The shot pans briefly down toward their feet, their boots stomping ahead along the uneven ground, then back up at the undifferentiated landscape in front of them.

“Clarke remains certain that she knows where she’s going. Whereas the rest of us have accepted that we are definitely, very much, _fucking lost_.”

“Shut up, Murphy,” Clarke orders, throwing the command back over her shoulder with barely a glance at him.

“No.” Raven stops up short, so abruptly that Miller almost runs into her. At the harsh bite of her voice, Clarke stops too, and turns to look at her.

She raises one eyebrow, surprised at the challenge.

“No, Murphy shouldn’t shut up, because he’s right,” Raven says. “We are lost, Clarke. _Lost_. In the middle of the woods. You can walk as fast as you want, but we are not getting closer to anything. We are not on our _way_ to _any_ where.”

The camera zooms in slowly, steadily. Only Raven and Clarke, and the space between them, fill the frame. Raven’s nostrils are flaring, her hands gripping tight to the straps of her backpack.

“Are you done?” Clarke asks.

Raven opens her mouth, hesitates. Then: “No. You’re acting like you have this big plan, so—” She gestures futilely. “Tell us. Share with the group.”

Clarke holds her gaze for another long moment. But before she speaks, she breaks, and turns away. “You’ll just have to trust me. We’re where we need to be. This— _feels_ right.”

“Bullshit!” Raven yells. “How am I supposed to trust you? And your _feelings_?” She turns the word into a taunt, mocking and cruel. “You couldn’t explain them last summer, and you can’t explain them now, and this time, you’re leading us all into—” She clacks her teeth shut, the camera so close now that the tic in her jaw is visible. Close enough that Raven notices it, hovering, focused solely on her face. “Murphy, turn that damn thing off,” she snarls, and reaches for the lens again.

Murphy swings it out of her grasp, and the shot lands, this time, on Clarke. All alone in the frame, she looks small, weighed down by her backpack, her hair starting to fall from its messy bun. A sad and distant look creases about her eyes. “Maybe you’d better,” she says. Her voice sounds small, too, weakly embarrassed. Someone makes an awkward coughing sound, and then, the tape drops into static again.

*

Darkness. Complete and uninterrupted darkness, and the sound of heavy, frightened breathing. The scratching sound of fabric rustling against fabric, invisible human movement. Above them both, the high and haunting whistle of a heavy wind.

Murphy’s ragged, trembling whisper: “Raven?”

A long pause. The swish and slide of nylon: someone moving close by, sitting up in the tent.

“Yeah?”

“Do you hear that?”

“Yeah. It’s just the wind.”

The piercing whistle climbs, steadily, rises and falls like strong winds do—at its highest, it reaches a pitch like a human scream.

“The tent isn’t moving,” Murphy answers. The words are cut short, barely formed through gritted teeth. “It’s not wind.”

A sudden jolt of flame, like torchlight, flares up without warning, illuminates the thin wall of the tent, the dark, foreboding shadows of the trees. Murphy and Raven yell out in surprise, and the video distorts with sounds of scrunching sleeping bags and the flailing of caught limbs, the scratch of a hand suddenly flung against the sides of the tent, bitter and bitten-down obscenities. Above it all, the warning shriek continues, violent and plaintive, and in the chaos, a true wind blows like a mad, unnatural storm, battering and bending the tent and whipping at the torchlight. The screams build again, barely settled and now excited to a new frenzy—no more surprise in them but only fear.

The camera falls over, the glow of the flame outside now pitched at an angle, wild as hell fire, and then, the picture cuts suddenly away—

*

Somewhere in the distance, two birds tweet a high, sweet chatter through the trees, no disturbance but their song, and the slow crunch of boots through a carpet of dry leaves, in the calm, clear autumn morning.

On the ground lies a curved line of identical gray oval stones.

“These,” Murphy says, with a hint of a sing-song lilt in his voice, as the camera pans slowly across them, “go all the way around the camp.” He pulls the shot up, and catches Raven, standing next to him and staring at the stones. Dark circles shade beneath her eyes, and she’s got her arms crossed, one hand up to worry her bottom lip with her thumb. “Tell me, Raven, did I arrange these, too?”

“Just—” she takes a deep breath, wincing as if the sound of his voice, or her own, were giving her a headache. Before she can say anything more, she’s distracted by the rush and flurry of footsteps and disturbed leaves, as someone else hurries toward them.

Clarke is jogging over from the second tent, high spots of color in her pale face, her hair pulled back in a loose braid. She’s wearing her coat over her pajamas, her boots untied. “Guys—Guys—” she announces, more breathless than she should be from the short run—“Miller’s gone.”

Her gaze jumps from Raven’s face, to Murphy’s behind the camera, then back, but neither answers. Clarke’s breathing sounds too loud in the silence, the crack and snap of a stray twig, as Murphy takes a step back, much too loud.

“What the fuck do you mean,” he asks, “‘Miller’s gone’?”

“I mean,” Clarke answers, slow and annoyed now, “that I woke up this morning and he wasn’t in the tent. And he’s not out here. He’s not anywhere.”

“He’s gone,” Raven echoes faintly.

“Oh, great!” The camera wobbles briefly, the sound of a hand hitting against a thigh faintly audible. “We got some creepy stick-dolls twisting in the wind, followed by even creepier night wailing and fire, and then these demonic stones over here, and _now_ one of our friends has been kidnapped. And you two are just standing around. I’m out here with two geniuses and neither of them is smart enough to call out creepy shit when they see it! And now we’re getting picked off in the woods one by one!”

Raven and Clarke both start speaking at once, stepping toward Murphy and closer to each other at the same time.

“We’re not getting picked off—” Raven starts.

“Those stones aren’t demonic,” Clarke says. “I mean if anything, they look protective—”

“Then they obviously didn’t work!” Murphy shouts over them both. “Because Miller is missing! Unless someone flew him home last night on her magical broomstick and now he’s safe in bed—”

“Would you just calm down a minute!” Clarke yells, so loudly, and with such authority, that Murphy immediately stops, and even Raven’s eyes widen as she takes a step back. The side of her heel bumps up against one of the stones, and she jumps.

She’s so on edge that she’s shaking, but her voice stays level, almost threateningly cool. “I don’t think being calm is the natural reaction here—”

“No, but it’s the smart one,” Clarke snaps at her. Her nostrils flare, and she has to close her eyes. Her hands ball into fists and then uncurl, her fingers stretching. “Okay,” she says, as she opens her eyes again. “We are going to handle this. Okay? We’re going to find Miller. We’ll have a better chance at that if we split up.” She glances between the others again, obviously anticipating an argument, her gaze set and defiant and her chin pointed up.

Raven’s jaw clenches, and she shrugs her shoulders toward her ears and looks down at the ground. Murphy takes a step back. “No,” he says. “That’s insane. We’re already lost and you want to make us _more_ lost?”

“We’ll cover more ground,” Clarke answers evenly. “We’ll be systematic. And—look—I brought flares. We’ll each take one, and if one of us finds him, or runs into any sort of trouble, all we have to do is send up the flare, and the others will know where to go.” She pauses, and this time neither Murphy nor Raven answers. She looks from one to the other, but not even the camera will focus on her. She remains adrift at the edge of the frame. “Look, it’s the best I can do,” she says. Her expression is still strong, authoritative, but the tenor in her voice is almost pleading. “Trust me. This is the best plan we’ve got right now.”

*

“Update on the best plan we’ve got,” Murphy’s voice narrates, slightly out of breath, but still deadpan, as he stomps through the woods. The camera picks up his breathing, his footsteps, the cacophony of leaves crackling underfoot, but little else. Straight ahead lies only more forest, no discernable path or goal or deviation in the landscape at all. The vision jumps and rocks with the unsteadiness of the cameraman’s hand.

“The update is that it sucks. It’s… maybe four in the afternoon. I don’t have much reliable daylight left. And, as expected, I am now even more lost than before—”

He sighs, and stops suddenly short. The picture sways and blurs as the camera turns over, and then settles again, focusing on a closeup of a pale young man, red-cheeked from exertion and hollow-eyed from lack of sleep. He’s wearing a green knit hat and a dark gray jacket, a black t-shirt underneath. The whites of his eyes are bloodshot.

“This is the face,” he says, each word slowly and precisely formed, “of fear. Utter, abject, _fucking_ terror. I’m alone. I don’t know where I’m going. I don’t know if I’ll ever make it out of these woods. If this is my last—Fuck!”

The video cuts suddenly to static, for only a second, then flips on again, to a shot of a moss-covered fallen log, from the perspective of the ground. Above the rustle of Murphy’s panicked breathing comes the unmistakable sound of footsteps in the near distance, and a steady, low chanting.

“Do you hear that?” Murphy whispers. “Guess I’m not actually alone. Hurray.”

He shuffles forward through the dirt, slowly lifts the camera until it can peer over the log. Through the trees, a figure is walking, so sedately that she seems to be drifting, through shafts of golden afternoon light. Long, blonde hair falls in waves over her shoulders. She’s wearing jeans, a t-shirt, and an unbuttoned red plaid shirt, but no jacket and no hat, and every now and then she looks down at the tattered leather journal she holds in her hands. But she never breaks the rhythm of her song, a deep thrum of foreign, inscrutable words, repeating, and repeating, and repeating.

The camera follows her until she is out of sight, and even longer, until even the chanting has died away.

Then Murphy scrambles awkwardly to his feet again. “Okay. Officially throwing out the plan now. New plan: go in the _exact opposite direction of that_.” As promised, he swings around and starts half-running, half-jogging, back the way he came. Stray branches hit the camera screen, the long limbs of trees barely dodged as his pace picks up, backed by the scratching, stumbling sounds of pounding footsteps and ragged breathing—then a shriek, and a yell of abject terror, as Murphy and his camera collide with something—with someone else.

The picture for a moment is nothing but a confused angle of trees and leaves and dirt, of hiking boots and knees, and when it finds its bearings again at last, it trails up from Raven’s feet to her scowling and still terror-stricken face.

“What are you doing, running like a maniac through the woods?” she snaps.

“What are _you_ doing, running like a maniac through the woods?”

Raven hesitates. “Thought I heard something,” she admits, embarrassed, with a defensive shrug of her shoulder. She refuses to meet Murphy’s eye or look at the camera straight on.

“Okay, and I _know_ I _saw_ something. Clarke, specifically. Reading from that gross old book and chanting.”

“No. No way.” Her brow furrows in disbelief, and she shakes her head, a jerky half-movement. “That’s ridiculous.”

“Are you saying I’m lying?”

“You’re creeped out and you’re on edge and you’re seeing things.” She wraps her arms tighter around herself and shrugs. “Just like I’m hearing things. We let Miller’s stupid ghost story get in our heads. We need to be smart about this, like Clarke was saying—”

“Clarke’s gone full-on wicked witch of the west!” He reaches out with one hand, grabbing at her shoulder as if to shake her back to her senses. “We can’t rely on Clarke anymore. Do you understand that, Raven? We _only_ have each other now.”

She shrugs his hand off, half-turns away and looks down at the ground, squares off her shoulders like she’s boxing herself in. “Yeah, I get it,” she mumbles. “Let’s just—keep going. I can’t stand the thought of staying still right now.”

“Yeah.” Murphy’s voice sounds hollow, distant. “I know what you mean.”

Raven adjusts the straps on her backpack, turns around to face the way she came, and leads them further on into the depths of the woods.

*

For once, an open patch of sky: pale twilight blue, streaked with thin pink clouds, and edged with yellow like a distant fire at the horizon. Beneath the great vault of it stretches an open clearing that might once have been an oasis in the wilderness. Now it’s no more than a graveyard, the body of a community turned to a handful of broken skeleton bones.

Of the original Trikru settlement, only one building remains. A small, wooden two-story house, battered and worse for wear but still standing, rises up at the far end of the clearing. The other houses have been reduced to their foundations. The last bits of them are fire-streaked and charred, like a decaying garden around the last house, the desolation that makes it stand out all the more starkly against the backdrop of the trees. A small plot of ground that once have been a vegetable patch is now only upturned earth, marked out with bare stakes in the soil. At the far right, two long rows of identical, square wooden markers pick out a small graveyard at the forest’s edge.

A gust of wind blows a scattering of leaves across the ground, makes the tree branches rattle and click like bones.

“I think this means we were going the wrong way,” Murphy says.

“No,” Raven’s voice answers, from off to the right. “I think this is exactly what we were meant to find. Look—”

The camera turns, as if directed, and focuses on the single remaining house. There’s movement visible now, barely, in the dark mouth of the doorway—the shot pulls back, a brief crunch of leaves sounding as Murphy steps back, shocked. “Shh,” Raven whispers. The movement resolves itself first into a body, standing in the door, and then, as it steps forward into the imperfect, shadowy light of evening, into a familiar silhouette.

“Miller!” Murphy and Raven yell, one shout overlapping the other, followed by the thud of two heavy backpacks abandoned on the ground. The view wobbles almost to incoherence as they run across the clearing, the pounding of footsteps on heavy packed dirt disturbing the near-silence of the woods.

But Miller doesn’t respond. He doesn’t look up at them either, as they reach his side and the camera steadies again. He only sits down on the ground, pulls a knife from one pocket and a stick from the other, and starts to chip away at the wood, whittling it into a point.

“Miller?” Raven asks again. But he doesn’t look up.

“Not Miller,” Murphy corrects. “Put another check in the ‘we’re screwed’ column.”

He zooms in, jerkily and with hesitation, but Miller still doesn’t look up. His expression utterly blank, as distant as if it saw into another time or place, he focuses intently on his inscrutable work.

The wind gusts again, stronger this time, the clouds above them shifting and casting new, dark shadows across the clearing. A flurry of leaves swirls across the dead foundations of the settlement, up against the side of the building, over their feet. Raven shivers. High and nearly inaudible in the bluster of the wind, a high moaning sound bleeds through.

The camera focuses on Raven, and the wary, uncertain flicker of her gaze.

“Do you hear that?” she asks.

“Like last night?”

She shakes her head, barely, as if afraid to move. “No. That.”

Barely discernible, there beneath what may be a coming storm, low like a body dragged through gravel and loose stones: a distant chanting. Heavy and ponderous and foreign words. Deep, down low, but growing. Coming closer.

The shot snaps without warning to the edge of the clearing, picks up the dark outline of a woman against the trees. Attempts to zoom in or adjust the focus of the camera do nothing. She seems half-body, half-phantom, blurring at the edges as if half-formed of smoke.

“We need to get out of here,” Murphy warns, a sharp spike of panic in his voice.

Raven is squinting out toward the forest, using her hand as a visor above her eyes, trying to see—“It’s just Clarke,” she says. “I—I can tell. She found us—”

She holds up her arm as if to wave but Murphy immediately slaps it down. “What the fuck are you doing?” he snarls. “That isn’t Clarke. It might be something in Clarke’s body. It might _look_ like Clarke. But it’s no more Clarke than this—this automaton over here is Miller.”

Raven glares at him, opens her mouth to argue, but Murphy snaps:

“Look, I know you’re still in love with her but we’re not going to die over it— ** _shit_**!”

The camera whirls to the right again, in time to catch the figure starting to move, to walk steadily toward them—then it drops to the ground and falls on its side, picking up a maniacally angled shot of Miller, still sitting calmly on the ground and sharpening the point of his stick, and Murphy pulling Raven through the gaping, black door of the house. Their voices overlap, jagged and scared.

“Murphy, what—”

“Go, go—hide—"

“You want to go _into_ this creepy hell hole—”

“Just go!”

“She already saw—”

A scuffle of harried footsteps, tripping over themselves, shakes the floorboards. Then nothing can be heard but the wind, still whistling, and a gentle rustling of the leaves, and the persistence of the chanting voice.

After several long moments, the chanting stops. The rustling stops. A pair of bare feet and the edge of two bare legs come into view. The figure bends, its palm briefly covering the screen, as it picks up the device. When the picture returns, the camera still pointed down toward the ground, it reveals the same legs and feet, walking without any urgency at all into the house.

The building is dark, only the thin light of fast-deepening twilight through the windows to offer any illumination at all. The floor is caked with a thick layer of soot and grime.

As if from a far distance, the chanting becomes audible again. The woman herself is humming, a gentle, sweet tune under her breath.

Slowly, she starts to climb the stairs. They creak beneath her footsteps. The darkness deepens, as she travels away from the sole source of light—then streaks with flickers of reflected flame, licks and spits of fire from above.

The camera stops when the woman stops, right at the top of the stairs. A hellfire light glows, illuminating her legs and her feet, and the rotten, charred floorboards beneath her. Over the chanting rises a tumult of terrified screams, in the tenor of two familiar voices—

Then nothing.

Only static.

*

The static plays for several minutes before Octavia stands up, still dazed, and turns the VCR off. Instead of returning to the bed, she sits down with a thump in Jasper’s beanbag chair.

Deep golden-purple light, from their own gathering twilight, seeps in beneath the almost-drawn blinds, lending the room a close and shadowed feel. The familiar shapes of Jasper’s desk and chest of drawers, his bed and his bookshelf, and the half-open door of his closet, all appear foreign now, imprecisely drawn in the gathering gloom.

“So, Siskel and Ebert,” Octavia says, “thumbs up or thumbs down?”

Monty and Jasper look at each other for a long moment, and then Jasper shivers, giving his shoulders an exaggerated shake. “I think whatever that was, was _super_ messed up.”

“They really didn’t find any of them?” Monty asks, turning abruptly to Octavia. “No trace or evidence or anything?”

“No trace or evidence or anything,” Octavia confirms. “Well—” She shrugs, and settles back more comfortably in the chair, casually confident in her knowledge of the legend. “Not of Murphy or Raven or Miller. They did find Clarke eventually—living under an assumed name out in, I don’t know, New Mexico or Texas or Arizona or wherever.”

“Oh, yeah, my favorite state,” Monty quips, “New-Tex-Zona.”

“Ha ha, very funny.” Octavia narrows her eyes at him, unamused. “The point is it was somewhere out west. _Miles_ away from Virginia. They tried to put her on trial for the deaths of her friends but they didn’t have enough evidence. There were no bodies, and she claimed not to remember a damn thing. Was all ready to claim insanity and everything so…” She shrugs, holding her hands out to either side of her, palms up, as if resting her case. “Nothing came of it.”

“How could you _possibly_ know all this?” Monty asks, incredulous, while Jasper just shakes his head.

“My brother told me,” Octavia answers. And as far as she’s concerned, Bellamy knows _everything_ , and is always, reliably right.

“No, no,” Jasper argues, “that’s not how it went down.”

“How do you know?” Octavia frowns, leaning up on her elbows in annoyance as her authority is challenged. “You didn’t even remember the Wanheda story.”

“Watching the movie reminded me! I remember my dad talking about it. They did find Clarke,” he says, “but in New York, not Arizona or whatever, and she was totally insane. Like, confirmed out of her mind, wandering the streets. She didn’t even know who she was, let alone what had happened out there in the woods.” He pauses, glancing from Monty’s face to Octavia’s. “She was probably a psychopath the whole time. Then the guilt of it just made her snap.”

Octavia scowls at him, crosses her arms tight against her chest but doesn’t argue. It’s the dumbest story she ever heard in her life, and definitely _not_ what Bellamy told her, but she isn’t going to get into an argument about it. That would be immature.

“You are both so _clearly_ wrong,” Monty announces, then, into the silence, and Jasper and Octavia each snap their gaze to him and start to protest. “No—seriously,” he insists. “Guys. Neither of those stories makes _any_ sense. First of all, if this missing girl was found miles from home with no memory of her past, that would be big news. Like, national news. And everyone here would be talking about it, since she’s from here. But I’ve never heard of it. Plus, it doesn’t match what we just saw on that tape!” He gestures broadly toward the screen. “I mean, was _all_ of that just, what, some sick prank gone wrong, to get revenge on an ex?"

Octavia shrugs, tense and reluctantly uncertain. “You can do a lot with camera tricks, you know,” she says. Then, with more confidence, “So what are _you_ saying, Monty? It was all one-hundred-percent real? Real witchcraft? Real ghosts?"

“I don’t know,” he admits. “But the last time my parents and I drove down that road past the auto shop, on our way to my grandma’s, I saw some really weird shadows in the woods. It was evening, so it was kind of hard to tell, but it looked like four people. So all I’m saying is—” He stands up, walks over to eject the tape from the VCR. It slides out smoothly, with a gentle click, right into his hand. “All I’m saying is I wouldn’t be caught _dead_ out there myself.”

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading! ~~Voting for this round of Chopped starts on Tuesday, October 27, and ends on Friday, October 30.~~ Please consider reading all the fics and ~~voting for your fave(s)~~ checking out more on this and other challenges over on chopped100challenge.tumblr.com.
> 
> I also wanted to give a big thank you to Sara (thelittlefanpire) and Bailey (dylanobrienisbatman) for running this event. I had a lot of fun getting spooky and creeping myself out!
> 
> You can find a moodboard for this fic over on my tumblr [@kinetic-elaboration](https://kinetic-elaboration.tumblr.com/post/633525080298782720/the-wanheda-tape-gen-former-clarkeraven-miller).


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